Tim Lott�s parents, Jack and Jean, met at the Empire Snooker Hall, Ealing, in 1951, in a world that to him now seems �as strange as China�. In this extraordinarily moving exploration of his parents� lives, his mother�s inexplicable suicide in her late fifties and his own bouts of depression, Tim Lott conjures up the pebble-dashed home of his childhood and the rapidly changing landscape of postwar suburban England. It is a story of grief, loss and dislocation, yet also of the power of memory and the bonds of family love.